It's still Apple time over here. Apple has not only released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, but it has also refreshed several pieces of hardware. Both the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini have seen spec bumps, and most interestingly, the Mini no longer has an optical drive (about time - that thing has become useless for me anyway; not even my workstation has one). They also got Thunderbolt ports, of course. Apple also unveiled a new Cinema display, called the Thunderbolt Display, for which a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac is required. Also... The plastic MacBook is no more.

I don't think ZIP and similar were ever a "removable media of the day" (so, overall, the supposed pattern is much weaker; plus, backing up whole HDD on media of such type would be a bit superfluous - with the amount of disc juggling in any possible restore, you could as well plan for a hypothetical reinstall of most everything and just back up important data)

And particularly "historical trend-setter" might be imprecise / Jobs seems to agree http://www.osnews.com/permalink?479626
Obsolescence of optical media not being quite here with the bandwidth issues around the world that you mention, vs. very cheap (in production / not like cost reductions would get eagerly passed on "consumers" in any variant) mass stamping of polycarbonate discs. But anyway, when the time for streaming HD movies arrives, we will probably (hopefully?) do it with some sensible approaches to network architecture.